Part 1
In my early 20s, I dated a lot. As a young woman in London, I had many matches on dating apps. I was on a work visa and felt trapped in a job I didn’t care about. Dating became my emotional playground where I could live out my intensity and hopes and dreams and feel like I was making some progress with my directionless life.
I don’t think people talk enough about dating in a big city when you don’t have community or family around. At first, you’re excited about the freedom, spending your own big girl money and doing whatever you want. There’s no one you have to check in with when you’re out late. You don’t have to worry about gossip around town when you make a fool of yourself on a date. Nobody knows you. There’s no existing shared context or connection between you and the person you’re dating.
And that’s the double-edged sword. Anything goes. You can click a button, and invitations appear, meetings happen. No one warns you or stops you because you need to tell no one. You don’t know what’s normal, where the boundary should lie, when the fun gets a little too much.
And before you know it, a stranger is sitting right next to you in a dimly lit restaurant, promising you your wildest fantasies without even knowing your last name. You’re young and impressionable and have no idea who you are in the world, so you want to believe him. He’s successful and worldly; he must know what he’s talking about.
You get high on feeling wanted and important and, for a moment, you don’t have to think about your own little life. You can quiet the voice that says, you’re nothing. You can look away from the fact that, really, you’re just really hurt. And lonely. And want to be held so badly.
Dating became a sort of addiction for me, or an escape hatch, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was never in a committed relationship, but I was also never single. I thought I had taken time between new dates, but as it turned out, I was always texting someone, getting over someone I couldn’t stop texting, or seeking attention from someone who couldn’t give a shit about me. I was never truly available.
Dating was a low-barrier, easy-access game of dopamine that I couldn’t get anywhere else in my life. Dating was a hunt for a variation of my so-called “type”, the successful, charming, hard-to-pin-down, ultimately unavailable man, to outsource my self-worth to and keep my obsessive mind busy, to reenact my only understanding of love growing up: intense and unreliable.
So every WhatsApp notification, every date invitation turned into coins coming out of a slot machine. I got to feel like I was winning for a second, knowing in my gut that the coins would stop coming, while holding my breath for the smallest possibility that this time it might be different, that he actually did care after all.
Who was I kidding? Of course, the coins always stopped.
Even when I thought I had been careful, I had learned my lessons, I had taken time before rushing into anything physical, I had let them pursue me, the ending would still be the same.
When a text was slow to come, when a date was cancelled, it felt like my world came crashing down. My anxious attachment would still make me say the wrong things at the wrong time, send walls of messy texts to emotionally stunted Tinder boys during work hours and feel like a helpless, unwanted, shameful child when I got nothing back.
I remember screaming silently into a pillow, asking myself why I never got what I wanted, why I had to be that way, why I couldn’t be as fun and light as many other girls my age who could easily get a boyfriend. I wanted to be loved so badly, but it was the one thing I seemed to constantly sabotage.
It was my reality for years, again and again, from one situationship to another.
Then, one day, I found another one of my “type” on a dating app. I thought this time it would be different because I had taken some time for myself and I had felt calm again.
But it wasn’t just the same as ever. It was worse.
He messaged me first every day. He sent me photos of himself and his friends to update me without me asking. He showered me with intimacy and attention at lightning speed without actually knowing anything about me. He asked me when he could see me again. I even continued to date other people, as one of those things I thought I’d learned to do better. But on those dates, I would stare at my phone waiting for his texts.
I would overlook his disrespect and our lack of any genuine connection. I couldn’t help but say yes to meeting him at the last minute, late at night, because his attention had become so central to my self-worth. I wanted to be chosen by him so desperately. A complete stranger I had only met a month ago.
When he finally told me he couldn’t commit to spending more time with me as he was en route to his next hobby at the weekend, I panicked. I bargained. I asked if we could just meet one last time. He left my texts on read that same day, and my cool girl mask slipped completely.
From that point on, it was like I was possessed. I sent him message after message. I was angry, then I was desperate, then I was sorry, then I was angry again, then I begged. And the cruelest thing was, sometimes, just sometimes, he would reply like nothing had happened. I held onto hope, then spiralled back into anxiety and shame when he stopped replying again.
He performed intermittent reinforcement like a professional, dangling his availability like a drug dealer advertising his best drug, and I was his most willing addict. I couldn’t stop. And it scared me. Time was passing me by; I was not at all where I thought I would be, and I couldn’t see any way forward if I kept doing what I was doing.
When I first moved to London, I had big dreams. Yet here I was, with nothing in my name, spending all my time looking at my phone, desperately texting a man I barely knew, who clearly didn’t even see me as a human being, unable to move through my day without hearing from him.
Drinking. Rotting in bed. Doing nothing with my life. My whole world had shrunk so small that I could disappear and no one would know. I couldn’t recognise myself anymore. I reached my breaking point.
That year was the year I decided enough was enough.
What had actually gone wrong
For years, I thought my problem was that I hadn’t met the right man.
Then I thought it was my anxious attachment. If I could act more secure, move more slowly, stop sending emotional messages, and let men pursue me, perhaps I could finally get a different ending.
But by the time I had my breakdown, I could see that this was much more fundamental than a collection of bad dating decisions.
1. My life had no centre.
Dating had become one of the only places where I felt movement even though it wasn’t actually going anywhere meaningful.
I felt trapped in my job. I was on a visa. I didn’t have family or a community around me who knew me and my background. I didn’t know who I was yet or what I was building.
Then a successful, exciting man appeared and offered me a glimpse into a different life. Through him, I could briefly become more interesting, more important, and closer to the person I wanted to be.
The fantasy gave me direction when my own life had none.
That was why I could become so invested in a man I barely knew. I wasn’t only attached to him. I was attached to everything I imagined being with him would rescue me from. Meanwhile, I was attached to nothing in my life.
2. Nobody was witnessing what was happening.
The anonymity of dating in a big city had given me freedom, but it had also removed every point of interruption.
The men I dated existed outside the rest of my life. Nobody knew them. Nobody saw what happened between us. There was no one watching in real time who could ask why I was accepting something that was making me miserable. No one to interrupt the fantasy before I became consumed by it. No one to hold my pain with me.
Later, therapy would become the first place where another person witnessed these patterns and feelings with me while I was still inside them. At the time, there were only me and the man who would gaslight or ignore me or was incapable of relating to me at all, so really, there was just me.
3. I had outsourced my self-worth.
I didn’t merely want love. I wanted a particular kind of man to certify my value.
The men I chose seemed successful, charismatic, and worldly. The men who had the career I had dreamt for myself. Because I saw them as more important than me, being chosen by one of them felt like proof that I might be important and worthy too.
His attention meant I was desirable. His interest meant I was special. His decision to keep seeing me meant I had value.
When he withdrew, I didn’t only lose contact with a man. I lost the evidence I had been using to argue against the voice in my head that said I was nothing.
4. I had outsourced my emotional regulation.
His attention could change how I felt in seconds.
I could go from anxious, distracted, and unable to function to calm and hopeful because his name had appeared on my phone.
When he disappeared, I didn’t know how to sit with the uncertainty or move through the discomfort without trying to get his attention back. I couldn’t meet my own needs. I had never learned how.
5. I refused to witness and validate my own emotional reality.
Intellectually, I knew when a man was wrong for me.
I could identify the red flags. I could repeat the internet advice. I could explain why he didn’t deserve me and why I should move on.
But I wouldn’t acknowledge the other truth: I was still attached. I was hurt. I was lonely. I wanted him, even when wanting him made no logical sense.
If the dating situation had been short, I used its length to invalidate my own pain. I told myself I should be fine. Then I tried to prove I was fine by dating someone else.
I was constantly analysing these men while refusing to give an honest account of what was happening inside me and tell myself it was okay.
6. I was never truly single.
There was never a real gap between one attachment and the next.
Even when I wasn’t in a relationship, there was usually someone occupying my emotional life. I was texting someone, trying to get over someone, waiting for someone or searching for the person who could make the previous one matter less.
I never took proper time to process what had happened. I hadn’t grieved. I hadn’t learned how to exist without organising my emotional life around a man. I hadn’t reexamined the stories I was telling myself, the voice inside my head.
I had simply transferred the role to someone else. That was why the pattern could continue for years even though the men kept changing.
7. I confused activation with attraction.
Stable and available men often left me feeling nothing. I called it a lack of chemistry.
The men who excited me were charming, intense and difficult to pin down. They created intimacy quickly, made me feel chosen and then introduced uncertainty.
That uncertainty activated me. It made me think about them more. It made every small piece of attention feel significant. It created longing before a genuine relationship had even formed.
I called that attraction. Really, I was recognising an old emotional pattern: love as intense and unreliable.
I wasn’t choosing according to whether a man could build a healthy relationship with me. I was choosing according to how strongly he could activate me.
8. I had information, but no discernment.
I knew what kind of man impressed me, but I had never worked out what I actually needed from a relationship.
I spent every date asking whether he wanted me and almost no time asking whether the relationship he offered was good for me.
I kept changing the rules of how I dated, moving more slowly, waiting for him to message first, continuing to date other people, without changing the criteria by which I chose a man.
9. This was not all happening innocently.
The final man was highly skilled at reading what I wanted, saying the right thing and creating the feeling of closeness. But he did not relate to me as another person whose feelings mattered. He related to me as a source of attention, admiration and entertainment.
What felt like intimacy to me was leverage to him. He withdrew it, watched me panic and then returned just enough to revive my hope. He knew that his attention had power, and he used it. He was the architect of that particular trap, whether he wanted to admit it or not.
His behaviour was his responsibility. But I also had to understand why I remained available for it. I repeatedly overrode what I could see, what I felt, and what I needed because preserving the attachment had become more important than protecting myself.
10. Shame kept sending me back
Every time I lost control and sent another message, I felt ashamed.
Then I wanted him to reply so I could feel less ashamed. If he responded warmly, perhaps I hadn’t humiliated myself. Perhaps I wasn’t needy, crazy or impossible to love.
So the person whose behaviour had triggered the shame became the person I needed to relieve it. When he ignored me again, the shame became worse.
I wasn’t only trying to recover the relationship. I was trying to recover my dignity through the judgement of the person who had helped me abandon it.
That was why the cycle felt so difficult to leave. Every attempt to repair the damage pulled me back towards its source.
Why I had to stop dating
I needed to stop dating because dating had become the place where I escaped myself.
As long as I kept moving from one attachment to another, I never had to feel the full weight of what had happened. I never had to face how lonely I was, how little I trusted my own judgement, how unable I was to regulate myself, or how much of my value I had placed in the hands of strangers.
I needed to learn how to recognise what I felt without immediately trying to escape it. How to meet my own needs. How to sit with uncomfortable feelings. How to manage my anxiety without asking the person destabilising me to take it away.
I needed to rebuild trust in my judgement and learn to act on what I already knew.
In Part 2, I’ll share what happened when I finally stopped dating, went to therapy, and began rebuilding the parts of myself I had abandoned.